Photo proofing – what it is and how it can help your clients?

Photo Proofing is process that allows clients to choose images/videos, before Photographer will make any work on them. This means that after photo session is done, you can just dump all images online, and let your client choose what you should work on.

This is the idea, a great one, as it removes lot of guessing, and wasted effort from your shoulders. What is more, client also feels more helpful(even if he knows nothing about photography art). Besides that there is more contact points, thanks to that client can feel progress of work.

Tools for photo proofing

There are some great tools out there, that concentrate wholly on photo proofing. These are online tools, often with mobile apps, and various other improvements. Such online photo proofing tools can be great if you don’t have website, or you are just not interested in bringing traffic to your site.

Problems with online photo proofing services

However this can create problems:

you have to upload images to external service,

you are billed monthly for such service(30$ or more),

another login and password for you and client to care about,

you lose control over your client,

you expose client to new service, while he was familiar with your website already.

These might not be big issues to some folks, but some really care about this. For them, best solution is to use photo proofing right on their site. If you care and your site is build on WordPress, then you are in luck.

Photo proofing on WordPress website

Photo proofing, or client area, is feature that enable your clients to select images they want/like right from your site. In some implementations they can also comments on photos, to tell you what they like or dislike about particular item. No extra hassle required. You have everything in one place, nicely organized and presented, so work at least in this area can be seamless.

Thanks to this your customers have easy interface that they use to communicate you what they want.

Typical process looks like this:

You create album with photos for your client to choose from.

You protect this album with password, that you share with your client.

Your client select and comment on photos.

After client is done, he inform you about it.

The more above points are automated, the better for you!

Rife Theme is Photo proof!

In our Rife WordPress theme, that is focused on photography and portfolios, we included photo proofing feature. What is more we have improved it beyond what we have seen already in other implementations.

Enhanced photo proofing process in Rife Theme consist of:

uploading your photos with bulk uploader, so you can just drag & drop your 200 photos,

you can work not only with photos but videos also,

client can comment on each photo and video,

you and client have access to filter, that can show selected, not selected and commented items,

if there is need, you can add additional filter(tags to images) in each album(this requires manual tagging of items),

client have option to mark album as “finished”, and that will send e-mail to you automatically and give notice about it in admin area,

whenever client will make some new selection, after he finished album already, he will get option to mark album as finished again, and you will get notice about it.

Example

Here is image that presents some of our improvements to photo proofing:

On top of image you can see filter for selected and commented items. Below you see parts of 2 photos. One on the left has been selected and commented, what is indicated by green circles. Photo on the right is not selected and not commented. Number displayed above each photo can be either added manually or it can be ID from WordPress media library.

Plans for improvements

We are not done yet, and we plan to add new features to make our photo proofing much better:

accessing albums with special link, that will remove need for password for client,

option to ZIP all selected photos, so client could download them,

adding place where you can get filenames of all selected images.

If you feel like there is something that can improve it, feel free to tell us about it!

Conclusion

Do you have website that you use to show up your creative work? Site that shows how skilled you are as photographer, thanks to which new clients dream to work with you. Why not to use same site to work with those clients, and show them that how professional you are? You can always switch to some external solutions, but why would you do that when you have photo proofing built in your site with Rife Theme?

Lead programmer in Apollo13 Themes, often can be seen on Apollo13 support. Working hard on making themes fast and reliable in ever changing WordPress environment. Air. is with Apollo13 almost from the beginning.
Living with Alice & Ali(the dog). Rife Theme FTW!